PEN-L exchange on Dobb and Brenner

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Stephen E Philion wrote:
>
>
> Actually Brenner was an epigone (funny how that word has really taken
> hold) of Maurice Dobb. If Brenner's writing is based on historical
> ignorance, you'd likewise make the move that Maurice Dobb's writing was
> also ignorance at work?

There was some excuse for Dobb, and for Marx come to that, because an awful
lot of work has been done since the 1950s digging in parish registers and
the like and that has deepened our understanding of what actually went on
in the English countryside. It's much more difficult now to argue that what
happened was unique etc, and I think everyone accepts this including
Brenner and Wood. Probably I'm too dismissive of Brenner, but I think the
volume of his work, the evident attention to detail, is undermined by the
erroneous + speculative conclusions he sometimes reaches. I think that when
studying this period: primitive accumulation in 18th c England, broadly
speaking: that after a point the law of diminishing returns applies,
because we still don't really know enough, and never will, and there are
too many unquantifiable variables, noise in the data and other
imponderables, so you get into arid speculation, and I think we've reached
that point in this discussion.

One thing that occurs to me is that you can indeed, as Yoshie was saying,
draw analogies with what is the situation today in many peripheral and
semi-peripheral countries, because the same forces are at work. And what
you see is highly contradictory and capable of interpreting in quite
different ways: and if this is so about what is happening right before our
eyes, then obviously it's even more problematic when it comes to
understanding what was going on 300 years ago. What we see today is the
same kind of Malthusian trap being sprung as was the case in England in the
18th c. There is dramatic population growth, and dramatic economic growth,
going cheek by jowl with equally dramatic mass impoverishment, land-hunger,
eco-despoliation, privatisation of commons etc.

In the 18th c, the malthusian trap was kept open by in effect internalising
entropy and making it into the mainspring of industrial development and
accumulation: because what else is the search for relative surplus-value,
if it is not a way of converting a problem (land-hunger, resource-shortage,
population pressure) into the possibility of growth? But for this to happen
successfully, you have to have a possibly unique confluence of factors: you
have to have, not only an 'empty world' in Herman Daly's term, ie one that
is relatively unpopulated and easily capable of colonising (but we now have
a full world) and not only immense scope for technical improvements, in
terms of energy intensity (but we don't now, because we are reaching a
theoretical limit in the transition from more to less efficient energies,
ie we have transited historically from wood, water, animal power, to coal,
to oil, and finally to hydrogen and electricity, and there is almost
nowhere else to go, the laws of physics being what they are) and finally
also you have to have very easily accessible low-entropy reserves of energy
and raw materials. In the 18th c all the growth indicators were set to
positive, but now they are almost all set the other way, and the return on
energy invested (ROEI) of the latest oil and gas discoveries is actually
very poor indeed, in historical terms; even coal is now getting quite
energy-expensive to extract. As Cutler + Cleveland have shown, the almost
uniquely decisive single factor in raisng productivity, is increasing
energy efficiency. Even better information systems, shortened circulation
time etc, can be boiled down to this.

It is all very well to say that if you even dare to mention resource
constraints you're some kind of physiocrat and you don't understand the
sublime mysteries of relative surplus-value extraction, etc. I am
constantly nagged at for this. But this objection is actually very close
Samuelson's notions of infinite substitutability *even of energy
resources*; which is absurd, and no better than Julian Simon's false
optimism. Energy really does matter.

Each new cycle of industrialisation during the past 300 years has seen two
related things happen: first the focus has moved away from smaller locales
to bigger ones. From Coalbrookdale to Birmingham, and then from England to
Germany, and from Germany to the USA. Now Asia. And each new phase
coincided with the introduction of essentially new energy systems, in each
case dropping one or more atoms of carbon from each fossil-energy molecule:
from coal, to oil, to natural gas. (It is not the carbon which gives the
energy, it is the hydrogen in the hydrocarbon molecule.) If you look at a
graph of these changes you can see, for instance, how the rise and fall of
the British empire maps onto the rise and fall of coal. But this movement
from intrinsically lower to intrinsically higher energy forms is not an
unmitigated good, and here's the rub. It turns out that the most efficient
energy for capitalism was petroleum; oil is better than coal, but is also
better than either electricity or natural gas or hydrogen, for most
industrial and transportation functions. There is a bleak message here. I
think that while there can still be debate about the size of fossil energy
reserves, it is becoming clear even to the unaided eye that there are now
serious problems about oil and natural gas supply. My position hasn't
changed. Per capita energy global consumption is a key index of human
progress. It peaked, as far as I can see, in 1980. From US Census Bureau
figures you can show that global p.c. energy consumption rose from 3.7 boe
(barrel of oil equivalent) in 1860 to 11.7 boe in 1973, where it stalled,
before rising to 11.9 boe in 1980, since when it has declined and is now
back to the 1973 level.

You can interpret this in lots of ways: the most senseless and idiotic way
is by talking about increased energy efficiency, which is more or less a
myth. Yes, energy per unit of GDP has fallen in the main OECD countries,
but unfortunately achieving this has entailed absolute increases in OECD
per capita energy consumption. This has only deepened inequality between
the Golden Billion and the Rest.

To be sure that anything fundamental was happening, one would I admit have
to wait another 10 or 20 years, all else unchanged, and obviously a lot
depends on demographic change. I don't believe nothing else will change!
The world-system is too unstable for that. So this 28-year stagnation or
slight fall in per capita energy consumption, 1973-2001, is a serious
indicator that something fundamental has come unstuck.

Incidentally, in 1998 global per capita gall/day oil-equivalent
consumption, according to the EIA, was like this: US and Canada, 2.9
gals/day; Other Industrialised, 1.4; RoW, 0.4 and Total World, 0.6 gals/day
(US gallons).

Some folks have a lot of catching up to do, and now they never will. The
Malthusian trap may not have sprung yet, but the jaws are still open.

Mark Jones

Louis Proyect
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